Good Food is First Food. It is not junk food. It is the food that connects nature and nutrition with livelihoods. This food is good for our health; it comes from the rich biodiversity of our regions; it provides employment to people. Most importantly, cooking and eating give us pleasure. …
Agriculture in tropical developing countries produces about 7–9 % of annual anthropogenic greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions and contributes to additional emissions through land-use change. At the same time, nearly 70 % of the technical mitigation potential in the agricultural sector occurs in these countries. Enabling farmers in tropical developing countries …
This report on the State of Indian Agriculture 2015-16 seeks to present a comprehensive analysis of the recent growth and performance of the agriculture and allied sectors and also to analyze the major emerging challenges. The multi-pronged strategy for agricultural development now comprises focussing on agricultural growth through sustainable use …
Storing carbon in land is no substitute for reducing fossil fuel emissions. The report finds that while increasing carbon in land systems is important, Australia is muddying the waters by combining land carbon and fossil fuel reduction policies – which is giving an inaccurate picture of Australia’s progress in tackling …
The Amazonian tropical forests have been disappearing at a fast rate in the last 50 y due to deforestation to open areas for agriculture, posing high risks of irreversible changes to biodiversity and ecosystems. Climate change poses additional risks to the stability of the forests. Studies suggest “tipping points” not …
A team of researchers led by the University of Birmingham warns that without significant improvements in technology, global crop yields are likely to fall in the areas currently used for production of the world's three major cereal crops, forcing production to move to new areas. With a worldwide population projected …
The interest in forest productivity estimation has increased in the last years as it is very important for forest management and the estimation of carbon stock, wood and non-wood products, etc. However, there are no estimates of productivity and stored volume and carbon of different forest cover types throughout the …
Landslides have large negative economic and societal impacts, including loss of life and damage to infrastructure. Slope stability assessment is a vital tool for landslide risk management, but high levels of uncertainty often challenge its usefulness. Uncertainties are associated with the numerical model used to assess slope stability and its …
The effects of climate change and variability on river flows have been widely studied. However the impacts of such changes on sediment transport have received comparatively little attention. In part this is because modelling sediment production and transport processes introduces additional uncertainty, but it also results from the fact that, …
New research has added to the growing list of challenges facing the nation’s pollinators. A study, published this week in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, suggests that agricultural changes in the Northern Great Plains — particularly the expansion of corn and soybean cropland — could be putting a …
Judgement of the National Green Tribunal (Southern Zone, Chennai) in the matter of M. Saravanan Vs Government of Tamil Nadu - Environment and Forest Department dated 01/09/2016 regarding widening a stretch of 35 km road adjoining the Megamalai Reserved Forest in Theni district, Tamil Nadu. National Green Tribunal in its …
The Conservation Reserve Program (CRP) is the largest agricultural land-retirement program in the United States, providing many environmental benefits, including wildlife habitat and improved air, water, and soil quality. Since 2007, however, CRP area has declined by over 25% nationally with much of this land returning to agriculture. Despite this …
The land ministry plans to draft a multilateral framework that could help developing nations in Asia make better use of their land through careful planning, government sources said. The sources said the ministry will propose the framework at the U.N. Conference on Housing and Sustainable Urban Development (Habitat III) in …
Earth's surface gained 115,000 km2 of water and 173,000 km2 of land over the past 30 years, including 20,135 km2 of water and 33,700 km2 of land in coastal areas. Here, we analyse the gains and losses through the Deltares Aqua Monitor — an open tool that detects land and …
Weakening of Indian summer monsoon rainfall (ISMR) is traditionally linked with large-scale perturbations and circulations. However, the impacts of local changes in land use and land cover (LULC) on ISMR have yet to be explored. Here, we analyzed this topic using the regional Weather Research and Forecasting model with European …
Human pressures on the environment are changing spatially and temporally, with profound implications for the planet’s biodiversity and human economies. Here we use recently available data on infrastructure, land cover and human access into natural areas to construct a globally standardized measure of the cumulative human footprint on the terrestrial …
The threats of old are still the dominant drivers of current species loss, indicates an analysis of IUCN Red List data by Sean Maxwell and colleagues. Original Source
Revegetation of degraded ecosystems provides opportunities for carbon sequestration and bioenergy production. However, vegetation expansion in water-limited areas creates potentially conflicting demands for water between the ecosystem and humans. Current understanding of these competing demands is still limited. Here, we study the semi-arid Loess Plateau in China, where the ‘Grain …
New research from North Carolina State University and the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) finds that choosing how to meet bioenergy goals means making trade-offs about which wildlife species and ecosystems will be most impacted. The work focuses on the southeastern United States, but yields general insights that could inform bioenergy …
From the late Pleistocene to the Holocene and now the so-called Anthropocene, humans have been driving an ongoing series of species declines and extinctions. Large-bodied mammals are typically at a higher risk of extinction than smaller ones. However, in some circumstances, terrestrial megafauna populations have been able to recover some …
RIO DE JANEIRO (Thomson Reuters Foundation) - The area covered by palm oil plantations worldwide could double without damaging protected areas or sensitive forests, Austrian researchers said on Tuesday. Researchers from the Austria-based International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis (IIASA) studied satellite maps from Southeast Asia, Africa and Latin America …
